Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#241

Post by daviddever23box » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 9:33 PM UTC

I watched the first three Mad Max films last night, in one sitting...while there is certainly an argument for absolute performance over time, it's becoming a lot more difficult to justify the power consumption of the current Intel (and, to a lesser degree, AMD) offerings, especially for sustained personal productivity and burst compilation tasks.

We cannot speak of performance without the per-watt quotient. Battery life is a real concern, and current Wintel laptops just don't compete.

Energy concerns are real (as depicted in the George Miller-directed films mentioned above), and it may be the case that the premium paid for Apple Silicon-based devices is actually a bargain.

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#242

Post by ilyt » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 9:35 PM UTC

wtallis wrote: post #153

theevilsharpie wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My Mac uses almost an order of magnitude less power than the PC and I keep the PC powered off. Either you are not measuring power consumption correctly, or there is something very wrong with your PC.

Or it's an AMD desktop. Their chiplet design really isn't good for idle power.

Seriously, even when doing nothing whatsoever (and cores themselves idling at 1.3W) the package is taking 20W.

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#243

Post by tiberious726 » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 9:39 PM UTC

pdpi wrote: post #177

spiderfarmer wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desktop pcs requiring a ludicrous amount of power and cooling is absolutely problematic. The amount of people willing to put up with big honking machines is dwindling.

> Desktop pcs requiring a ludicrous amount of power and cooling is absolutely problematic. High-end PSUs now overlap with smaller space heaters on power output. My living room is usually 3-4 degrees hotter around my desk than it is by the dining table.I'm looking to upgrade my gaming PC, and getting the power budget under control is surprisingly challenging.

> High-end PSUs now overlap with smaller space heaters on power output

Technically true, but vacuously. The limit of a standard US circuit is 1500w, which is why you see all space heaters and the good PSUs hitting the figure

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#244

Post by nunodonato » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 9:41 PM UTC

jerrygenser wrote: post #183

pdpi wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Desktop pcs requiring a ludicrous amount of power and cooling is absolutely problematic. High-end PSUs now overlap with smaller space heaters on power output. My living room is usually 3-4 degrees hotter around my desk than it is by the dining table.I'm looking to upgrade my gaming PC, and getting the power budget under control is surprisingly challenging.

For your gaming PC you likely don't even need a current gen chip. You are probably fine with a 5600 for most games unless you NEED high FPS on certain games and have a monitor with 244hz refresh rate (or you won't even get the frames) Gaming is mostly about GPU (if you're casual gamer and want to run 1440p) but if you do need cpu and high refresh rate then you're likely hardcore FPS or RTS games and you're running at…

except if you are playing Flight Simulator... in VR. Then even a current-gen build will struggle a bit :)

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#245

Post by pavelevst » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 9:45 PM UTC

I’ve used core i9 mbp16 for almost 3 years and this week I’ve used M1 Pro mbp, seeing hide differences in performance and knowing the actual difference in tests of these 2, it make me think that apple international slowdown and heat up intel macs, like they did (and may be still do) with iPhones

I also remember my macbook unibody 2008 and mbp 2012, with them I could do a lot with 4gb ram, even on hdd, nowadays 8gb is kinda too small for most of programming jobs, it look like macs keep getting better hardware every year and macOS using it more and more aggressively

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#246

Post by theshrike79 » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 9:46 PM UTC

NotYourLawyer wrote: post #237

redundantly wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're doing it too. You're assuming how someone would define a workstation, you're assuming that definition includes it being power hungry. A workstation can be a single core, 256MB RAM, 1 watt SBC. It can be a 96 core, 2TB RAM, 1 kw beast. It can be anything in between or even outside of that range. I'm not saying everyone cares about power consumption, but several people here seem to be saying that no one does, an…

> A workstation can be a single core, 256MB RAM, 1 watt SBC. No. Words have meanings. Workstation does not mean that.

What does ”Workstation” mean then? What kind of ”work” is it meant for?

Accounting? Writing? Programming? Video editing?

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#247

Post by ElFitz » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 9:47 PM UTC

incrudible wrote: post #186

sunflowerfly wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One differentiator is the amount of memory available. Apple's shared pool of memory means the GPU has potentially up to 96gb of ram at its disposal, where discrete GPU's are often limited to 8, 12, 16, etc. They mentioned in the keynote that the M2 can handle many tasks discrete GPUs cannot simply because they run out of ram.

$15,000 will buy you an A100 with 80GB of RAM at 2TB/s that will annihilate the biggest Apple chip.

Sure, but then that’s the price of multiple entire laptops. Or 2 Mac Pros. Not sure what point you’re trying to make here.

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#248

Post by masswerk » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 9:50 PM UTC

zamalek wrote: post #170

Demmme wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that not matter on a fair comparison? It's a no brainer anyway to get more performance from desktop and non apple much cheaper due to apples pricing. Apple has a huge advantage price / performance wise with the cheap m based Mac book air. The comparison with a Mac book pro which costs 2-3k is slightly less so.

> Apple has a huge advantage price / performance wise My 7950x machine cost, excluding the enthusiast GPU, $3000. That's less than half the cost of the M2 Ultra.

Mind the second part of the quote,

> Apple has a huge advantage price / performance wise with the cheap m based Mac book air.

The MBA is in the US $999 with M1 and $1099 with M2. (You can get them even at about $800 in sales.) This is an entirely different segment.

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#249

Post by BirAdam » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 9:54 PM UTC

llm_nerd wrote: post #123

The M2 has been a bit underwhelming in general through all of its iterations: Apple jumped into such a lead with the M1 [1], so it was disappointing when they slowly iterated while Intel and AMD have made enormous strides catching up. Everyone keeps citing TDP, but given that we're talking about desktops that just isn't a huge factor. Having said that, the 7950X was released late February, and the 13900KS was release…

From what I understand, the M2 was released due to TSMC struggling with yields on their N3 process. Apple had to do something with the N5 node to keep hardware available to consumers, and M2 was the result.

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#250

Post by wtallis » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 9:56 PM UTC

doctorpangloss wrote: post #215

411111111111111 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's not price segmentation, it's planned obsolescence. The 3080 series would be fine for likely beyond the 50x0 series gpu-wise, but current games are already starting to stutter unless you downgrade textures because of its limited VRAM

The performance of the chip is matched to the memory size. I think it’s a U shaped curve. Beyond 80GB, today, the larger chip would maybe all of these: yield less, scale worse, take too much power, etc. Like this matching of compute resources to RAM is partly the difference between CPUs and GPUs. Anyway, it’s just to say that it isn’t a business decision. The extra RAM in the M2 doesn’t help the GPU much for the same…

> The performance of the chip is matched to the memory size.

That may be approximately true if you only look at a single generation of consumer graphics cards at a time. If you compare across generations or include non-gaming workloads the correlation falls apart.